The Ring: Unearthing its real life origins

This week we are time traveling back to the 2000's and exploring a movie that has haunted me for years- The Ring. Turns out that Samara, the little girl who likes to climb out of televisions, took inspiration from several frightening folktales as well as a real person about a hundred years ago. We'll tell you all about it...if you dare! Maybe make sure your television is turned off first. Just in case.

Sources:
Chizuko Mifune and the Practice of Psychic Photography (the-line-up.com)
https://www.curiousarchive.com/the-ring-origin-story/
Japan's Onryō Spirits Inhabit a Purgatory of Revenge and Cosmic Rage - Atlas Obscura
Oiwa | Japanese Ghost Stories | Yotsuya Kaidan | Scary For Kids
Oiwa | Yokai.com
Haunted Yotsuya: Hidden Ghost Stories in Tokyo | Blog | Travel Japan (Japan National Tourism Organization)

Transcript

Welcome back to myths in movies. I’m Erin and Sarah couldn’t be here today. 

Thank you for joining us as we dive into our favorite movies and learn about fairies, trolls, mythical monsters, and folklore. 

We’ve been talking about a lot of fairytales and their meanings lately. I thought it would be fun to totally change direction and talk about a horror movie.

This week we are covering 2002 movie, The Ring and the Japanese legend behind it.

So when the Ring came out, it was huge. I was too young to be aware of it when it aired in theaters but it became sort of a cult classic when it released on video. It made the rounds of every girl’s sleepover, including the ones I attended. I wasn’t a scary movie person really and so I had a very low tolerance for scary stuff. It scared the crap out of me and for weeks, I wouldn’t watch tv by myself. I knew that Samara probably wouldn’t come out of the television, but I really wasn’t willing to risk it.

So for those of you who didn’t see it or those of you who have never seen it, let’s go into the plot a little.

Naomi Watts plays a reporter who investigates the death of her niece. She keeps hearing about a cursed videotape, so of course she gets a copy and watches it. Seconds after watching it, the phone rings and a raspy voice tells her she has seven days to live. Her kid watches the tape too which lights a fire under her to figure out where the tape came from and how to stop it.

Eventually she learns a little girl named Samara is behind the whole thing. She was adopted by parents who eventually murdered her because they were sure she was evil. They buried her in a well so Naomi frees the ghost from the well, thinking that this will lift the curse. Nope, the little girl murders her friend instead. Turns out, the ghost has spared them, because they made a copy of the film and someone else watched it. And then it ends.

It makes little sense- but it’s quite compelling to watch. Everything is told in drips and drabs, so the whole time, you are desperately trying to figure out what’s going on.

This movie is actually a remake of a Japanese horror film. They in turn got the plot from a novel which is now a series of five books. Six if you count the short story collection. They all have the same name, the ring. I thought this was a reference to the circle of light around the well cover that buried Samara. The filmmakers thought it was a reference to the telephone ring when you get the creepy call. But according the author, it was a reference to the cyclical nature of the plot.

Now this movie was successful in America, but it was ten times more popular in Japan. There’s at least a dozen sequels, including a film where the main character fights another monster, sort of like Freddy vs Jason.

What is fascinating to me is how different Japanese horror is. In American horror, the plot is similar to a Western. The monster is the outsider and then you have the main character that must defeat the outsider. In Japanese horror however, films are more experimental. Stories aren’t told chronologically, instead it’s flash backs to memories. It’s more of a psychological terror vs a scary monster on the loose.

I’m not saying one is better than the other- they are just different and of course tropes exist in each genre.

Now we need to talk about the Japanese version otherwise the ghosts that inspired the film will make little sense.

This is a quick summation-

So the beginning is very similar, a journalist is out to find the reason for her niece’s mysterious death.

She and her ex husband find a hidden message in the tape which leads them to a small island. Once there, they learn the story of Shizuko, a woman famed for her psychic powers. Turns out a creepy doctor arranged a viewing of Shizuko’s powers to all the press. She couldn’t perform under the stress and was called a fraud. She eventually committed suicide.

The daughter, Sadako, also had psychic abilities and used those skills to kill her mother’s critics.

Now in the book, things are a little different- after visiting her father, Sadako is kidnapped by another doctor. He rapes her and unknowingly infects her with smallpox. He then throws Sadako into a well. She died and the final images running through her mind were captured on a videotape. The rage she felt apparently seared those images into the video. Her smallpox infection also embedded itself in the video and that is why the video acts like a virus that just keeps replicating itself.  

And then the rest is the same- the journalist is spared by making a copy of the tape and ensuring it continues on

Personally, I think this version makes the most sense. First, there is a reason why Sadako/Samara is so angry. In the American version, she’s just a devil. But I think the fact that she is hell bent on revenge makes her scarier, because it could happen to anyone who has been wronged.

Second, I really like the smallpox part. Embedding smallpox into a tape is a new twist that surprised me. I liked it.

So now that you know all about the ring- let’s talk about the inspiration for the story.

First we will talk about the real life inspiration for the characters and then the folklore that inspired it.

The real life inspiration for the mother character dates back about a hundred years. At the time, spiritualism was huge and scientists wanted to study it. That was the aim of a man named Fukurai who was an assistant professor at the university of Tokyo. He was bound and determined to prove that psychics and thoughtography were real. Thoughtography is the ability to project images from your mind onto a medium like paper or film. He called it nensha, which means sense inception.

To prove that this was a legit thing, Fukurai sought women who worked as clairvoyants.

One such woman was named Chizuko Mifune. Her backstory is interesting- she married young and divorced soon after. The reason for the divorce- her in laws declared she was a thief. Her husband had misplaced some money and she suggested looking in a drawer of a Buddhist altar that her in-laws used. Low and behold, the money was there. Her in-laws accused her of hiding the money herself, but Chizuko said she was innocent.

After the divorce, Chizuko’s brother helped her develop her psychic abilities through meditation.

And apparently she was super good at it. Her big skill was locating illness in the body, which I guess you would then a doctor about? Not sure. She also located lucrative mines for wealthy businessmen which seems a bit dodgy. Although is it worse than charging desperate people so that they can get a message from a deceased loved one? I would say no.

Anyway- Fukurai performed a bunch of experiments with Chizuko. And like many after him, he was fooled by her gifts. There have been many experiments, including a CIA funded one, where researchers have been fooled. Time after time researchers don’t follow strict guidelines that would prevent cheating and time after time they get fooled. For more information, watch honest liar, a documentary about James Randi.

Fukurai bought in 100%. And made her the face of his experiments. He did a public demonstration to convince every skeptic. The professor prepared several messages, put inside sealed pipes, and asked Chizuko to guess at what the letters were. She got them all correct and the skeptical press demanded she do it again. And again, she got them all correct.

Well, it would have been a triumph for the ages except word got out that the professor had written all the notes and told Chizuko what they were beforehand. The press then labeled her a fraud.

This story changes when the professor tells it. According to his book, once Chizuko got some notoriety, a bunch of other women claimed to be clairvoyants. A few were found to be frauds and a newspaper singled Chizuko out, casting doubt on her abilities. She claimed that she had no more use in this world and later died from an ingestion of poison. I will say that I find the professor to be an unreliable narrator so take that with a grain of salt.

But she really did die of suicide which is a great tragedy. Everyone deserves to live a happy and fulfilled life. And I blame the professor for most of this. I’m sure he put enormous pressure on her, probably telling her that the fate of the movement was in her hands.

But Fukurai did not give up after her death. He worked with other clairvoyants and two of them were the standouts. One was named Ikuko Nagao. She supposedly had the ability to burn her thoughts onto photo plates. And that was the exact same ability the psychic had in the Japanese film. Her daughter, Sadako, is the one who can burn her thoughts onto a video tape.

Fukurai decided to do another demonstration but this time with Nagao. Basically the same thing happened again, reporters pointed out the fakes and then there was a torrent of bad press. And again, the supposed psychic didn’t handle it well. While she didn’t die by suicide, her health did decline rapidly and then she died.

It is very sad. So to lift our spirits back up, let’s talk a little bit about thoughtography. It is technically different than spiritualism but to me, it’s all the same. You’re conducting a séance, you’re staring into a crystal ball, sounds the same as burning your thoughts into a photo plate.   

This of course wasn’t possible until there was photography which emerged in the mid 1800’s. Thanks to this emerging medium and then new craze of spiritualism, you had all the conditions for a scam. 

It also helped that this happened right after the Civil War, so many people were desperate to know if their deceased loved one was alright. Photographers began to notice that you could manipulate the exposure to produce an image that looked like a ghost.

One photographer, Mumler, used a photo of his cousin and manipulated it with glass and exposures so that it looked as if his dead cousin was in the photo with him. And of course, a business born. People wanted photos with their deceased loved one and he was making it happen. Mary Todd Lincoln was one of his clients and there’s a photo of her with Abe behind her.

It was definitely a scam, but it was sold as genuine. Mumler was later arrested and tried for this scam. He was acquitted but eventually stopped doing the photos. One fun fact, P.T. Barnum testified against him and said that he was exploiting people’s grief. Which is absolutely true. Now if P.T. Barnum thinks that your scam has gone too far- you should re-evaluate your life. I mean this was a time when 2% of the American population died in the war. People were traumatized and were desperate for help. And scammers were happy to take their money.

This is was all tied with the spiritualism craze. I cannot overstate how big it was. Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of the President Abraham Lincoln, attended seances and Lincoln even conducted one in the White House where he asked the spirits to help guide him while he led the nation. Can you imagine that happening today? There would be a ten year investigation into it.

Not only were cameras used to get a nice ghost portrait, but they were also used in seances or magic tricks. A ghostly image would be captured on film to prove that ghosts did in fact walk among us. And people who absolutely should know better were tricked. Talking about Arthur Conan Doyle. He defended that Mumler guy and said it was all a conspiracy to defame him. Which is a lot. But smart people do stupid things all the time.

As technology has progressed, the more people insist that it able to prove the existence of ghosts. When digital photography was huge, orbs often appeared in photos. People thought those orbs were ghosts, instead of what they were- dust. Now we have video and voice recorders which those ghost hunters on the travel channel use to try to capture a ghost on film. There are even ghost apps which will place a ghost in any picture. There are also apps in which you can supposedly detect a ghost. The more technology we get, the more we try to use it catch a ghost.

Back to the Japanese professor- he had just lost two of his most talented psychics and he learned nothing. He just kept going with his experiments and he found one psychic named Sadako. Just like the girl in the ring. I honestly think this woman had mental health issues because the doctor thought she was possessed by two different spirits, one being a gremlin and the other being a Buddhist priest. We would probably know that better as an angel and a devil. Now when I say that she had mental health issues, I’m not saying that I think she had multiple personalities. I think it’s more likely she had some sort of trauma and pretending to be these different personalities released some of her issues. For example, the goblin personality seemed to come out without Sadako’s knowledge and act on her behalf. To me that says, she didn’t feel comfortable yelling at the professor herself, so she invented a character to do it for her.

This idea of possessing two different personalities is later explored in the ring novel series, where Sadako is actually a twin.

Anyway- Sadako, the real lady, apparently didn’t care for the professor. She found these experiments to be quite taxing emotionally so she quit after a year. And I applaud her. The more I read, the more I think this professor was an emotionally abusive jerk. I think that it’s worth noting that three out of the maybe ten women the professor worked with during this time became deeply disturbed. I’m not saying that he did anything to them, we have no way of knowing that.

But I do think the fact that Sadako had a character that would come out and fight Fukurai shows that she desperately wanted to push back against him and felt she couldn’t. I would love to know what he did, because I’m just imagining her in a white room, guessing what’s underneath a plastic cup. Obviously it wasn’t that benign.

Fukurai later publishes a book and that’s when things really went south for him. The book was loudly denounced by his colleagues. The scientific standards were very shotty and eventually the university itself denounced the book. Fukurai resigned from his position and started his own organization- the Fukurai Institute of Psychology. It does not research psychology, they only investigate the paranormal, despite the name. And the Institute is still in operation today.